Why Cloud? - A Review Of Cloud Adoption Determinants In Organizations. Slides created for the presentation at the 23rd European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) Link to the full paper: http://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2015_cr/13/

1. Why Cloud? - A Review Of
Cloud Adoption Determinants
In Organizations
Aleksandre Asatiani, Aalto University School of Business, Helsinki, Finland.
ECIS 2015, Münster, Germany.

2. Motivation
- Inconclusive results across studies.
- Lack of high-ranking publications on cloud adoption.
- No thorough reviews summarizing empirical findings.

3. Methods

4. Literature search
- 7 databases: AISel; EBSCOHost; Google Scholar; Proquest;
ScienceDirect; Scopus; Web of Science;
- 6 search terms: “Cloud adoption“; “Cloud computing adoption“;
“SaaS adoption“; “IaaS adoption“; “PaaS adoption”; “XaaS
adoption“;
- 5 criteria: Published peer-reviewed articles; original empirical
studies; adoption in organizations; clearly identified adoption
factors;

5. Search results
- 76 articles after manual review of titles and abstracts.
- 31 articles for the first step of the review.
- 18 articles for the second step of the review.

6. Step 1
Goal: Identify cloud adoption factors used in previous
studies.
Approach: Concept matrices – identify, code, group.
Outcome: 5 adoption categories, 43 adoption factors.

7. Step 2
Goal: Explore empirical evidence behind adoption factors
and adoption decision.
Approach: Systematic review (Jeyaraj et al. 2006).
Outcome: Set of cloud adoption determinants.

8. Findings

9. Adoption factors categories
Drivers 11 items
1. Cost advantage
2. Relative advantage
3. Accessibility
4. Strategic flexibility &
adaptability
5. Implementation times
Barriers 14 items
1. Security & privacy
2. Cost unpredictability
3. Complexity
4. Lack of standards in SLAs
5. Technological limitations
Organization 7 items
1. Compatibility
2. Management support
3. Organization size
4. Transaction costs
5. Previous experience with
cloud
Cloud Providers 5 items
1. Provider reputation
2. Provider competences
3. Customer support
4. Economics of scale
5. Location of data
External
factors 6 items
1. Legal issues
2. Competitive pressure
3. Social influence/peer pressure
4. Shared best practices
5. Partner pressure

10. Determinants of adoption
argued in case of qualitative studies, relationships between independent variables and adoption of
cloud. I used the five categories created on the first step of the analysis to draw a framework for
summarizing findings (Figure 2). These findings present determinants of cloud adoption, which
proved as relatively reliable predictors, backed up by empirical evidence.
Adoption of cloud
Drivers of adoption
Cost advantage ++
Fast implementation ++
Opportunities for innovation ++
Strategic flexibility +
Focus on core competences+
Accessibility +
Trialability +
Relative advantage +
Online collaboration +
Inhibitors of adoption
Security & privacy --
Performance risks --
Economic risks --
Lock-in –
Organization
Management support ++
Attitudes towards technology +
External environment
Partner pressure ++
Cloud providers
Provider reputation ++
(++) More than 80% of the evidence is positively significant
(+) 60% to 80% of the evidence is positively significant
(--) More than 80% of the evidence is negatively significant
(-) 60% to 80% of the evidence is negatively significant
Figure 2. Cloud adoption determinants based on cloud adoption literature.
After coding relationships according to a direction and significance, I followed Jeyaraj et al. (2006),

11. Future research
- Further exploration of underrepresented categories.
- Cloud impact of business processes.
- Studies in broader context.
- Impact of cloud providers.

12. Questions and comments
Key findings:
- Cloud adoption categories
- Set of empirically supported
adoption determinants
- Need for further studies:
- underrepresented categories
- broader context
- cloud providers
Asatiani, A. (2015). Why Cloud? –
A Review of Cloud Adoption
Determinants in Organizations.
23rd European Conference on
Information Systems (ECIS),
Münster, Germany, 2015.
http://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2015_c
r/13/